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Thursday, August 26, 2010

Like Thinking you are Squeezing Lemons: A Different Take on the Attack on Ahmed Sharif.

Ahmed H. Sharif was the New York City cab driver who was attacked by Michael Enright and Mr. Sharif gives us a much longer account to the New York Times, and you won’t hear me say this very often, but its worth reading.Yes I know, the New York Times.I am as surprised to write that as you are to read it.

Anyway, as you read this I want you to keep a few facts in mind.Bear in mind that Enright was embedded with a unit in Afghanistan, to shoot a documentary.He was in film school.

It was the first fare of the cabdriver’s shift. A young man hailed him at the corner of Second Avenue and East 24th Street, wanting to go to 42nd and Second. It was 6 p.m. on Tuesday; the traffic was dense.

Once the fare, Michael Enright, a 21-year-old film student who had been recently trailing Marines in Afghanistan, settled in the back, he started asking friendly enough questions: Where was the driver from? Was he Muslim?

The driver, Ahmed H. Sharif, 44, said he was from Bangladesh, and yes he was Muslim.

As the cab inched up Third Avenue and reached 39th Street, Mr. Sharif said in a phone interview, Mr. Enright suddenly began cursing at him and shouting “This is the checkpoint” and “I have to bring you down.” He said he told him he had to bring the king of Saudi Arabia to the checkpoint.

“He was talking like he was a soldier,” Mr. Sharif said.

That is when the attack started, but I want to stop there.Especially to a lawyer this account has a certain familiarity to it.It starts to sound like an absolutely classic scenario in pleading insanity.

A lot of people think that the insanity defense will basically say that if you are diagnosed as “nuts” in any way then you get out of jail free.This is not even remotely true.Generally (and each state varies) you have to be a very specific kind of nut.One common variety is where the person is so far gone they literally have no idea what they are actually doing.And there is a classic example given to make you understand it intuitively.Imagine you are so given to hallucination that you are thinking that you are squeezing lemons to make lemonade, when in fact you are actually squeezing a person’s neck and killing them. In that scenario you can truly say that the person literally didn’t understand what they were doing.

And isn’t that maybe what was happening here?As you read his account you really start to think that he literally thinks he is in Afghanistan, and somehow he is trying to get the King of Saudi Arabia through a checkpoint.I mean I suspect you might get a brain strain if you try too hard to understand, but it seems like at the beginning of the ride he was alert and oriented, in touch with reality and somewhere along the way, he entered Afghanistan in his mind.

Of course that is assuming that Mr. Sharif is telling the truth but there is no reason to doubt him.And it is assuming that Enright was not putting on an act, which is much less certain.But if you believe Sharif is telling the truth, and Enright was not putting on a nutty act, then this might be equivalent to the lemon squeezing example.

Obviously that means he might have the insanity defense available but I have a deeper point to make.

Everyone is so eager to turn this attack into a larger symbol.But the truth suggested by this account might very well be simply this.Enright was so insane he didn’t even know where he was, or what was going on.And for everyone, including the New York Times, to pretend this says something about our culture is simply wrong.

The violence that erupted during the cab ride came amid a heated and persisting national debate over whether to situate a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero. Upon learning of the attack on the cabdriver, some Muslim groups called for political and religious leaders to quiet tensions.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement: “As other American minorities have experienced, hate speech often leads to hate crimes. Sadly, we’ve seen how the deliberate public vilification of Islam can lead some individuals to violence against innocent people.”

Oh and not for nothing, but it turns out that Mr. Sharif is one of those knuckle dragging bigots who is opposed to the GZM:

Recently, some passengers asked him about the center planned near ground zero, he recalled, and he replied that he was against it, that there was no need to put it there.

About Me

Just a regular, sort of cranky moderately conservative lawyer, living in the greater Washington, D.C. and ruminating on law, life and the local spectator sport known as politics.
Btw, if you want to email me, write to edmd5.20.10 [at] gmail.com. I assume by now you understand that you are supposed to use one of those @ symbols for "[at]."